The Worst Parts
by ignitesthestars
Summary: Not all curses can be lifted. Annabeth's blindness remains with her after Tartarus; this is how she deals.


The worst part is being unable to design.

Everything else takes adjustment, but she manages it because she's Annabeth Chase, and what other option does she have? She made it through Tartarus with her sight taken from her, she helped to defeat Gaea while blind; she can move and fight and command as well as she ever could. Not because she's suddenly gained super-hearing or anything like that, but because she already knew a thousand cues other than sight to clue her in on where an enemy was, how to kill it. Without being able to see, she learned how to rely on them better, not how to hear someone cough from a mile away.

As for strategy, well. Her sight had been taken, not her brain.

But the rush wears off. The war ends, and Annabeth has to return to an existence that is more than running the razor edge between life and death. It's hard to decide, whether it's best that she'd been made blind in the middle of all that, when she would have had to start anew afterwards anyway, or if it's worse because life is alien enough without being able to see any of it.

She can't decide. She wishes she wasn't blind at all. She feels bad, _awful_, the worst person in the world for wishing that, because she's surrounded by the memories of dead teenagers. No one tells her she should be grateful to be alive, but she is anyway.

She decides to learn Braille, which is an unending exercise in frustration. It turns out that it doesn't matter if the words get to her brain through her eyes, or her fingers - her brain is still hard-wired for Ancient Greek. She explodes, rants for at least an hour at Percy about how if something _that terrible_ had to happen to her, the least it could do is take the dyslexia with her sight.

Annabeth doesn't need to see his guilt. She can hear it, in the way he doesn't have the words to give her to make it better. He takes her hands instead, presses a kiss to each fingertip, and sits by her as she starts again.

He asks her once, if she wants him to learn alongside her.

"What for?" It's a touching offer, but there isn't much point. It's not like they ever communicated via writing before, and she also knows he'd be _terrible_ at it.

There's a part of her that thinks she doesn't want any part of her blindness to become about Percy's learning disorders. She loves him, but he's already claimed a part of it with his guilt.

Her misfortune is not a lesson.

She relearns Camp. She discovers that there's no way to hear how low a tree branch is, and takes on a more advisory capacity in games of capture the flag. When she mentions this to Chiron, he immediately offers to clear all branches under 5'10", and she gently reminds him that it's a training exercise for everyone, not just her. She's not the only one who needs to learn how to work with impaired vision.

Athena cabin benefits from the focussing of her attention; they win more than ever. And after the celebrations are done, Annabeth finds a training dummy, or Percy, or anyone else willing to play _arai_ for her and hits and kicks and slashes out her rage.

There _is_ a new beauty in some things. In the quiet moments on the beach, listening the crash of waves, the play of the wind over her skin. Going underwater holds a new terror and rush of adrenaline, and she does it over and over until she can't tell if she's laughing or crying with it.

Percy - they never really had the change to know each other as boyfriend and girlfriend before, and Annabeth aches at the loss of things she never had. But she learns him in new ways too; the timbre of his voice, the shifts in his breathing, his hands on her and her hands on him. He hovers, and sometimes she appreciates it, and sometimes she elbows him in the stomach or throws him on the floor out of sheer irritation. Sometimes he takes it, and sometimes his own frustration and anger get the better at him, and they bite off insults and yell at each other. Sometimes she deserves it, and sometimes he does.

It takes her some doing to convince him that it's all right to get mad at the blind girl. He protests that she's not 'the blind girl', she's just Annabeth, and that sets off a whole new argument because not _everything_ she says is 'some kind of reflection on her fragile post-blindness mental state, Percy, for crying out loud!'

And even if it was, it's not up to Percy to remind her who she was, or is, or tell her what she's going to be. She can lean on him, on her friends, even on her family a little bit, but they can't fix this for her. It's not really something that can be fixed, only moved on from.

She hears whispers of blind architects, of accessibility building, of special embossing printers that spit out raised plans. She hears them, and turns away.

Some things take longer to move on from than others.


End file.
